What is agentic marketing?

Optimizely used Opticon NYC to show what separates an agent from the AI tools that came before it.  

On stage, "Paige," a Product Marketer Virtual Teammate, found underperforming pages in the analytics platform, drafted the fix, routed it for brand and legal approval, and published it once signed off: a full brief-to-published loop, with a person approving the outcome rather than carrying out each step.

That loop is agentic marketing. A marketer sets the outcome, not the task, and an agent plans the route there, carries it out across the relevant systems, and comes back for approval rather than instruction.

McKinsey defines agentic AI as "systems built on foundation models capable of acting and executing multistep processes," rather than tools that simply respond to a single prompt. Salesforce describes the same shift in its own agentic marketing guide: the marketer sets the strategy, and the agent carries out the execution. A generative tool waits to be asked again for the next step. An agent keeps going until the goal is met.

Mark AI and the five Virtual Teammates

Optimizely's Opticon NY announcements demonstrated that difference. 'Mark AI' is a set of models trained specifically for marketing work, evaluated across 285 marketing functions. The five Virtual Teammates are role-based agents built to own a workflow end to end, covering coordination, SEO and AI-search analysis, marketing performance analysis, personalisation, and conversion-rate optimisation.

Between them, they're capable of doing much more than a scheduling tool: choosing which page to fix first, which message variant to keep running because it's winning, and which approval to chase before it becomes a delay.

Optimizely also launched Agent Visibility, which shows how a brand appears in AI-generated answers and which competitors are being surfaced in its place, and Agent-Ready Experiences, which structure content so agents as well as people can find, understand and act on it.

At Opticon NY, Optimizely explained why this is so important for enterprise brands: AI referral traffic and crawlers now account for around 60% of web visits, which turns building for machine readers into a practical requirement rather than an experiment. 

Why the keynote focussed on people, not the product.

Optimizely's chief executive, Alex Atzberger, opened Opticon by arguing that human judgement is what can't be automated, however far the technology goes. A Forrester-led session later in the day elaborated on the same point: "AI creates abundance. Human judgement decides whether any of it matters."

Optimizely's own research shows why that caution is deserved. Its 2026 Global Data Study, a survey of 2,003 marketing leaders across seven markets, found that 76% spend at least three hours a week correcting or fact-checking AI-generated content, and that confidence runs unevenly through organisations: 69% of C-suite respondents believe their AI adoption is fully aligned, against 27% of the analysts doing the work.

Optimizely's marketing lead, Tara Corey, put it this way:

"AI was supposed to give marketers room to think. What most teams got instead was more to manage." 

What Opticon means for marketing leaders

Three things to focus on now, regardless of your technology provider.  

1. Find out how your organisation shows up in AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results, and who is being surfaced in your place.  

2. Decide where to place the human approval gates before agents start drafting and publishing content at scale: who owns brand and legal sign-off, and at what point in the workflow.  

3. Treat the confidence split above as a governance signal, not a communications problem: give whoever owns that sign-off responsibility for checking what agents publish. 

How Mando Group helps

Mando Group is a B Corp certified Optimizely Platinum Partner based in the UK.

We help organisations govern, configure and get measurable value from the AI and experimentation capability already included in their Optimizely licence. Find out more about our digital optimisation services here, or start with an Optimizely Health Check (for Optimizely users) or Digital Performance Health Check (for users of other technologies) to understand where you can get better ROI from your investment in digital.

Agents can now do the work ‘Paige’ did on stage, but the crucial decision - what that work should be - remains one only humans can make.